Early Plans For Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Revealed

It only seems like yesterday that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn was released but it was a couple of months back now and talk of the next release is already rife. It will be Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon. This week Scott James Remnant the Ubuntu Development Manager made an announcement about some of the early planned features for Gutsy. Scott James Remnant –“Now that the set of feature goals planned for Ubuntu 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”) has been largely finalised, it seems like an appropriate point to announce the plan to the world.”So here is a brief summary of the details revealed in the statement. Gutsy will ship with GNOME desktop 2.20 for Ubuntu or KDE 3.5.7 if you prefer Kubuntu. It was also revealed that the developers hope to make 7.10 the first distribution to ship the new merged 3D desktop from the Beryl & Compiz projects, they also aim to enable this by default if supported hardware is detected. This could be a great move I think, the first thing most people I speak to about Ubuntu say is “how do I get the cool 3D stuff turned on?”.

Hardware Support:

Linux Kernel 2.6.22 – With all the additional and updated drivers

Xorg 7.3 – Improved graphics card support and monitor hotplugging

Support for some “winmodem” chips out-of-the-box with improved restricted driver manager

It was also revealed that this will be the first Ubuntu release to have a mobile edition for portable devices, this sounds really interesting to me, all I need now is a mobile device to try it out on, if anyone wants to send me one feel free ….as if 😉

So, preparations for Gutsy Gibbon are well under way it seems. This 6 month release cycle can almost make you feel dizzy at times but I like it. Loads of new toys to play with. It should be remembered though that these feature lists often change right up to the launch day, don’t bank on seeing all of these things in Gutsy, there will probably be a few surprises added in as well. If you want to read the full statement you can check out the link below.READ THE FULL ANNOUNCEMENT HERE